Data loss situation – best chance of recovery

Data Loss Situation – Best Chance of Recovery
** At the moment you have a failure it is important to record what you remember and from this point forward what you do to attempt getting the data back.
Technicians have to be detectives in some cases as when the drive arrives it is very vague as to the events leading up to the failure and the failure itself – then the what steps did you try for the recovery question?
**Avoiding doing anything further that could cause damage to the data is of course based on what type of failure has occurred.
Logical recovery – data deletion or read errors mean that anything you apply to the drive can cause further damage as the drive is still in working order.
Electrical damage – likely safest of all failures as if the drive does not receive power the data can not be changed or affected until power is restored to the drive.
Physical failure – clicking, whirring, grinding and internal noise and every time you put power to the drive the data has a chance of further damage incurring. I liken putting power to the drive at this point to Russian roulette as you power up the drive it’s putting the most force into the reading heads and if then you hear silence the heads may well have died completely at this point and a ring is made then causing the data to be “unrecoverable”
**If you have a logical deletion or failure – do not download any recovery tools to the drive you wish to recover data to – you would be surprised how many end users over write the data they are wishing to recover.
**If you drive has picked up read errors or bad segments you can imagine a defrag or scan disk option being like the card file at the library and at the time the drive is working away putting everything in a new order behind the scenes it would be like throwing the library card file up in the air as the drive is then loosing al the pointers on the drive that point to the location of the data stored on the drive.
**Always stop to consider how important the lost data is. Do you have a copy? Who might have the back up of your lost data- something you have emailed as in pictures? Then you can decide value on the missing data – what the important data is you have lost and what measures you will take to recovery the data – or not. Sometimes the cost of the recovery will out weight the value and other times the value will be found to be irreplaceable.